Posts tagged as dent

These are a bit late, so let’s keep them quick.

On Longridge I wrapped up the draft of the HTML/CSS course I started in Week 356.

I’d written all the content already; all that was left was the two practical exercises, where the learner first marks up a webpage, and then adds CSS in step two to bring it to life. These took a little ‘rehearsal’, making sure the instructions lined up with the results, and adding as much clarity as possible to the instructions.

In the end, I framed them a little like a puzzle. I made sure included each exercise included a bit of boilerplate code that learners might be able to use to help them with solutions to their own exercises. After all, problem-solving on the front-end often comes down to a combination of your own knowledge and a looking at what you’ve already got.

I also rehearsed my own screencast walkthrough of one of the exercises, and discovered that I’d have to script the key points I needed to hit, or else it’d get rambly fast. I’m planning to record those at the end of week 358.

I did a little planning for this winter’s Hyper Island teaching on their part-time Digital Management MA. The structure of this year’s days is coming together, but there are still has some gaps in the schedule, which we had a phone call to try to fill in.

I also got a little while to spend on Dent. I built the board up and, other than one missing trace, this time, it worked correctly! I managed, after some wrangling, to get the UF2 bootloader onto it, and then get some test firmware on. I’d say the work was about 75% successful: all the UI elements are working correctly, and I’m reading the SD card over SPI fine. But the DAC audio out is proving troublesome, so when I get another moment, I guess there’s more debugging to be done.

And that was it. Mainly: typing, thinking.

Back after a few weeks away, and straight to the studio. No time to build up the boards and stencils that arrived for Dent: instead, I went straight into writing and content review on Longridge.

I got my head down on writing content so the team could review my style and give me some pointers. I managed a first draft of about a third of one course; I need to wrap up the rest by next Wednesday.

I also reviewed the interview films that had been shot whilst I was away. The team kindly provided transcripts and timestamped footage to go over, and I had to work out what should go into the final film. It’s hard to do this solely from a transcript - you end up finding that intonation is key, or that sometimes the way somebody’s said something just flows more naturally in a different take. So I sat down with the footage and Hitfilm and hammered out a couple of ‘assembly’ edits - nothing final, and they wouldn’t contain any of the cutaways or B-roll that the video team had for the final film - but enough to get a feel for if the final edit we were hoping for would flow. I know I could have just supplied a script or a cut-list, but it helped reassure me that what I hoped was possible would work.

In a spare moment, I fixed a firmware bug on 16n that had been nagging a lot of people for quite a while. No great breakthrough on my part; instead, a well-framed bug report suddenly made the issue very clear, and half an hour in an editor got the bug fixed. Now I’m just finding people to help me confirm there’s been no regression, and then I’ll try to package that up into a release in the coming weeks.

Head down on production for Longridge. That meant a few phone meetings with the production team, finalising a few more participants, and lots more pre-interviews with video subjects.

That’s all done, now, and the video shoots will be taking place over the next couple of weeks.

I also spent some time preparing a few more scripts for non-interview films, and getting drafts of them out for review. One - just trying to describe in simple terms, the round-trip of a browser request - flummoxed me for a long time; it got lost in hundreds of words on DNS and ended up baggy, boring, and over-long.

A few days away from it and I found a different approach. I sat down and worked out what the point of this film was - what I wanted learners to come away from it with. I knew this in my head, but needed to emphasise it to myself, so it was time to write out the big ‘beats’.

Seeing them laid out gave me a slightly different direction on the same story, and allowed me to bring it in well within our time limit. Yes, it simplifies a few things, but it still tells the truth. The change is it now ‘spends’ its time on the key beats, and pulls focus on things that we don’t need to know about (yet). If you write for a living, you likely know this lesson innately; for me, it’s reminder of muscles I need to keep exercising.

Finally, before I head off for a vacation, I generated a “revision B” of the boards for Dent and ordered them - along with a plastic solder stencil. They should be with me when I return, and perhaps we’ll have more joy. I’ll be head-down writing Longridge then, but a project for spare moments.

On the projects front:

• Longridge is getting off to a good start. I’m hunting down contributors, doing introductions, firing off emails. I’m also beginning to write some scripts just to get my hand in and to see if they line up with what the production crew are expecting. Not quite where I wanted to be by the end of Friday, but the team seem pleased where we are, and I had several good meetings with them during the week so I’ll take that and carry that momentum into next week.
• Dent is going back to the drawing board, but possibly not for a month or so, given Longridge combined with impending holiday. It turns out the current build just won’t behave; I spent some time with a J-Link really prodding at the thing and no amount of work in gdb would solve my problems. So we’ll start again in October.

I spent a little time getting myself quickly up-to-speed with some new technologies this week - always good to keep my hand in, and at least one of them was an audition for Longridge:

• I finally wrapped my head properly, clearly around CSS Grid; gosh, what a breath of fresh air. It makes two-dimensional grid layouts just a breeze to write. I also managed to understand its relationship with (and differences to) flexbox. After a long period of reading docs, I now had understanding in my hands. Good.
• To that end, I managed to tear out all of Bootstrap from this site - which had used it for positioning. Replaced the lot with CSS Grid and Flexbox in under an hour. Very happy with that - and also happy that the trade-offs for users of older browsers are, to my mind, totally acceptable.
• I continue to poke and prod at Javascript frameworks, and spent an evening (off-duty) kicking the tyres on Svelte. I’m interested in Svelte for how it approaches the reactive-UI pattern, but also how it removes the load on the client by just… being a compiler. Given the Javascript community’s fondness for (or, perhaps, reliance on) transpilation, going the whole hog doesn’t seem that much of a difference. I quickly ported my personal ‘hello world’ of reactive UIs to it, and enjoyed the process, the clarity, and the light page load. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ‘magical’ binding and slightly higher need for simple stores; I found myself using stores and subcription in places React would force me to explicitly pass functions and state down, endlessly, which to my mind is both good and bad., Still, I like its approach to reactivity and its single-file component structures, and especially its approach to performance and webbishness.

And that was the technology I played with; not project-oriented, but useful for me in lots of ways, and worth sharing here, as a log of what I get up top.

A good week - but gosh, the next two are going to be busy.

Longridge is now fairly positioned on the launchpad.

The structure and broad content of the courses are now signed off; that means all that’s left is writing them (and making a number of films). I had a call about content creation for the project, and that means I’m going to be kicking off equal amounts of writing and production tasks next week. A little bit nervewracking, but we’ve got a plan and a list of things to burn down, and so the job now is to work through it and make sure everybody’s happy. I’m going to be making some spreadsheets to keep track of everything (or, maybe, some crazy walls)

I also kicked some tires on an exercise I was thinking about using on Longridge, and everything seemed to work as I hoped, so that’s a goer. One less thing to worry about.

Over on backburner projects, my prototype PCBs for Dent arrived early in the week, along with the stencils for soldering it up. So I spent Monday bringing the board up: getting the paste applied, getting components on the board, baking them on, and then looking to flash the firmware.

Which, not entirely unexpectedly, just didn’t work at all. Not a complete write-off - I can see the board over SWD, but no joy flashing it, and the main thing that happens when you power it up is that the microcontroller gets really hot. That’s… not the desired functionality.

I wondered if it was my solderpaste, so I built up a second board largely by hand, with only hot-air used for the QFN MCU, but no dice. I went back to the drawing board - EAGLE - and decided that I’d definitely been having some strange ideas about how the schematic should come together. I drew up a Revision B, from some better reference material, and perhaps I’ll send that off soon-ish and we’ll try again. I also spent a while double-checking everything I could about flashing Atmel SAMD51 chips, and learned a fair bit: I might well use a different toolchain next time around.

Anyhow, it’s probably worth another iteration, so that’s a thing to be going on with. It’s going to be a few weeks before new revisions will arrive, which is a good thing, as I’m going to be busy! A long weekend coming up; Week 347, we begin some typing in earnest.

A quiet week spent exploring with my hands.

I continued my explorations of Dokku as a hosting option, spending some time looking at best-practice for deploying Wordpress to it - and then working out how that lined up with my own preferences around deployment (notably, specifying Wordpress as a dependency in composer).

That was a useful exploration - getting hand dirty with some servers, turning something I’d often end up doing by hand into something more automated - and I at least got to something sensible and working by the end of the week.

I spent a day documenting what I’d done. Not ‘documentation’ that resides in the text files I use as a digital notebook; ‘documentation’ other people would find useful. That’s a challenging thing to write clearly and unambiguously. The end result was perhaps too long, but I think it explains itself clearly enough, and includes appropriate code snippets and samples.

I hope I’ll publish that somewhere next week. If nothing else, it was good practice to write some real documentation for something technical, multi-stage, and complex. I’ve got more writing coming up this month, and it was good to get a handle on my pace of writing (and, for technical work, getting a feel for how often I need to bounce between edits and writing). And, who knows, it may still be useful for someone.

On Friday, my circuit boards for Dent arrived from China and I set about assembly. These are the smallest component sets I’ve ever had to assemble - the 0603 is all fine, but the QFN microcontroller has been a pain. (QFN is probably the first of the surface-mount IC packages that is ultra-hard to do by hand, as it has no exposed pins. It’s really designed for a robot and oven to do).

I’ve been practicing with solder paste, stencils, and hot air, and whilst the first stage of my assembly seemed to go OK, the usb socket on the board has possibly not gone in correctly, leading to some powering issues, a very hot chip, and a frustrated me to end the week with.

Still, I have an idea where to take it next week, and I solved a few problems at the firmware/bootloader end for once I’ve got the chip up and running.

Quiet, but busy, and some good studio conversations with my colleagues throughout.

After an intense week 343, 344 was much quieter. I got some feedback on the work so far on Longridge, so spent another afternoon or so wrapping up my work there, going over that feedback, adding some new things, and sending it all off for approval.

A box of parts arrived for Dent. Not much happening there til the prototype boards arrive, however, so that’s sat on my desk.

In “learning things” time, I spent a little while exploring new deployment options for servers. In particular, I spent some time looking at Dokku, a containerised deployment platform that installs to a greenfield server environment and then allows deploys via git pushes. It uses Heroku-style ‘buildpacks’ to provision and configure server infrastructure. I’m not sure I’ll move to it just yet, but a small amount of work got me a setup that will compile Hugo sites upon deployment and then point nginx at the deployed folder. Useful to consider as a way of gardening future servers, and also of standardising deployments and tools for myself.

And at the weekend, I saw in this picture of Richie Hawtin playing live… that he’s got a 16n as part of his rig (spot the faders between the tangle of cables that is his modular synthesizer, and the little 303-clones by his waist):

I was pleased and proud of that.

A busy week: lots of work, not a huge amount to say, as a result.

I spent four days at After the flood on High Vinnalls. This was a product development and data exploration exercise. I worked on exploring some datasets for an ongoing client project over theirs, building tools to quickly spelunk around in the data and establish signal, noise, and see what other things would reveal themselves. Not in order to visualise them, necessarily, nor to make a data-exploration product. Rather, the exploration was to support product development and invention. What products might be possible? Does the data support various ambitions?

ATF presented to the client at the end of the week, so it was an intense few days of thinking, sketching, and coding. Really good to be in the room working closely with designers as we tried to understand the shape of what we’d been given to work with.

In amongst that, I went up to Leeds on Wednesday night to spend all day THursday on a workshop at the University for Longridge. The goal of the workshop was to devise the structure and outline of three short courses I’d been writing. This too was very, very intense; I think we made good progress, but I’ll need to return to what we did in week 344 to finish up a few last things - and to be able to look back on it with the benefits of some perspective!

I also got a goahead at the weekend for an initial exploration into Dent, which may, or may not, turn into a project in due course. For now, it’s a quick pass to just see if anything is possible. This is a small hardware project - very much something on the side, but a nice backburner project if it comes off.

Phew. Busy, busy week.